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About Me

I enjoy collecting antique quilts and making reproductions of them both big and small. I've made a few baskets and I'd like to make more. I dabble in knitting and would love to learn rug hooking, but it's hard to find time to do it all. I work in higher education and I love my job. However, I do spend a lot of time dreaming about quilts.

1857 Album Quilt - BOM

Glorious Applique

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Tackled the photo issue so I have more pictures to share

Note to self - bring the good camera next time you get to see antique quilts. Okay, now I have that little bit of bookkeeping out of the way I can tell you a little about a couple more quilts I saw yesterday. Above, is a corner. Why show us a corner, you may ask. But, if you are a fabric lover like me, you will know why. Wouldn't you love just a bit of that fabric used in the border? Since this quilt is something like c. 1850 I'd say that was some very special fabric. The colors are divine.

The photo above is from the same quilt as the corner picture. I hope you are able to enlarge the photo by clicking on it because I am not sure you can see what is quilted between the two partridges (not a bird expert so they might not be partridges). It's another partridge! Looks a bit like a duck but who am I to criticize. And that fabric...!

Now, for the one I absolutely adored. This one was so big I couldn't get a full shot of it. So, above is the center medallion. Hopefully, you can see those small little feathered arcs and get a sense of their size. So much detail in such a small motif. And the color! I really can't tell if the fabric used in the piecing was actually pink - as it looks now - or a red that faded. Probably pink(ish) given the date of the quilt which is 1823. Truly, I could have spent the entire time just taking in this quilt. There was so much quilted into it, the fabrics, the piecing, the overall effect...

We have another eagle here. Is he gorgeous, or what? I also love the way Amelia, the quilter, embellished her floral fabric motifs by adding trapunto sprigs.

Finally, I tried very hard to show you Amelia's signature block. It reads: "Made by Amelia Lauck in the 62 year of her age November 15, 1823. There are FOUR nearly identical extant quilts by Amelia Lauck. Two in the collection of the DAR Museum and two in the Colonial Williamsburg collection. You can read more about the DAR Museum quilts on the Quilt Index (www.quiltindex.org). Amelia lived in Winchester, Virginia and there were slaves in the house. So, she may have had help on these elaborate quilts. The one pictured here was made for her only daughter. The other one in the DAR collection was made for her son and his wife and the inscription appears on a banner in the eagle's mouth on that one. It would appear the son married in 1830 - date on that quilt's inscription - but it is likely that quilt was made around the same time as the one pictured here.

Thankyou so much for sharing these quilts!! The fabrics are still so vibrant and the quilting (trapunto) on the bottom quilt is amazing, so much to look at and so beautifully done. Thank you again, I will come back again (already been 3 times) to look over the trapunto quilting and beautiful fabric...is the centre piece a printed panel? Gorgeous!